ILLUMINATION Writers Content Strategy

Questions & Perceptions

A quick feedback analysis on our content strategy

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. Napoleon Hill

First of all, congratulations to our writers for the impact they created today.

Our readers adore our writers. What could be better than this!

More followers discovered our writers within the last 24 hours.

As recorded in this article, we had 2314 followers yesterday. When I checked our stats an hour ago, today, noticed that we have 2853 followers.

The first time in the last three weeks, we gained 539 followers in less than 24 hours.

Our distributed list made a real impact on our recognition. Our content was awesome. I received an overwhelming number of emails from our valued readers. I had to create a new feedback folder in my Gmail to add the feedback coming from the readers to a specific folder.

I scanned through all of them quickly as first thing after my work.

Gratefully, 99% of the emails have positive feedback with accolades. Only fewer than 1% are asking questions and requesting validation. I want to address three points requesting clarification and validation today.

Here are the three questions I copied from this 1 % of emails asking clarification. I share my response below.

Question 1. “You give too much focus on entrepreneurship for writers, is it because you want to make money from the publication?”

Question 2: “Why so much poetry???!. What has it got to do with diversity and variety that you keep telling us? We much prefer reading the articles on real life issues.”

Question 3. “Some of your writers seem to to have a handful of followers. The majority of the writers that I follow have 10K or more followers. Why do you consider them as good writers?”

Since I didn’t have much time today after my paid work, I provided a brief response to these thought-provoking questions as I value every reader of our publication. I believe they have good intentions and want to learn more about our strategy, goals, and values. I did not see these three questions as criticism.

My quick responses to these three points

I want to share my responses briefly copied and pasted from my email responses for transparency purpose in our community and respect to our readers.

Question 1: “As the leader of the crew, you give too much focus on entrepreneurship for writers, is it because you want to earn more money from the publication?”

My response: As a valued reader, I will be transparent to you. Let me put this in perspective for you, the best monthly income earned from my Medium articles (over 200 articles) is less than 20 minutes of my monthly salary earned in 9600 minutes. In the last three weeks, each day, I invested three hours of my reading time (around 3780 minutes) to support (read and write) for ILLUMINATION. I hope these figures illustrate how negligible the income from Medium as a writer is. Hypothetically, if ILLUMINATION gets ten times bigger, perhaps my income will increase to 200 minutes of my salary for around 37800 minutes of investment. Do you believe any smart and entrepreneurial technologist will be doing this for money? By the way, we don’t charge our writers to publish in our publication. It is a free Medium service to writers so no additional income from the publication. We don’t use advertisements either so the publication and the community has no income goals as you may think. We focus on building our skills and experience.

Question 2: “Why so much poetry???!. What has it got to do with diversity and variety that you keep telling us? We much prefer reading the articles on real life issues.”

My response: Thank you for this feedback. I respect your preference for not liking poetry. However, poetry is an important and widely accepted art form. There are over 100K poetry followers on Medium. We are delighted to support this demand. Besides, giving a chance to a diverse group of artists in multiple genres is one of the strategies of our publication. We have no intention to reduce the number of our poets. In fact, I encourage more poets to join ILLUMINATION. By the way, we have over 60 topics each day on real-life issues that you mention. Compared to other publications, we believe that our ratio is balanced. We received many accolades on the diversity and variety of our topics from other readers. We plan to increase the amount of fiction a bit more, as there are many fiction readers on Medium too.

Question 3. “Some of your writers seem to to have a handful of followers. The majority of the writers that I follow have 10K or more followers. Why do you consider them as good writers?”

My response: I agree that some of our writers don’t have many followers. There are several reasons for this. Some of our writers are experienced writers, but they are new members on Medium, like myself. I am a published author with over three decades of content development experience but joined Medium 4 months ago. It is not viable to gain substantial followers in such a short time. I have multiple thousand followers on other platforms. Another reason is some of our experienced writers are not conversant with social media and connection tools. I discovered very high-quality writers with over four decades of writing experience on Medium with a few followers only. They simply don’t know how to extend their network on Medium. Many creative writers are not necessarily entrepreneurial in their approach. It is one of my primary goals to increase the profile of these super writers and help them gain visibility by a larger audience. They all understand and follow my humble suggestions. We started cross-pollination using innovation tools. You are welcome to visit our Slack channel to witness the collaboration and synergy. ILLUMINATION has a high focus to increase quality and quantity in innovative ways. In a year time, all of our writers are expected to have over a few thousand followers. This is my fervent desire and focused mission. Stay tuned, and we will prove it.

Hope my answers add some clarity on our goals and increase the trust of our readers for our service for them. As I mention in our each distribution list, our readers are extremely important to us. Without them, our creativity doesn’t mean much.

Thank you all for your excellent customer service focus which is well recognized by our readers.

A quick snapshot of publication stats today

124,525 minutes of read

129,015 views

2853 followers

1,293 new visitors

255 writers

48 editors — content curators

1450+ articles submitted

Featured article for today

Each day we feature an article.

Our editors selected an article from Rick Dobson who is one of the most experienced and insightful member of our community. We all can learn a lot from Dr Dobson’s wisdom.

Introductions

Meet our writer Erin King from her creative pen

Distributed Articles to Medium Topics

Two great articles from ILLUMINATION were distributed to topics.

An article from Kimi Ceridon (kceridon) distributed to #self

An article from Mike Schoenhofer distributed to #self

Today’s Topic for discussion

Talking of distribution, I shared an article to share my concerns on distribution based on my recent experience. I’d appreciate your feedback, your views, and experience on curation as response to my article.

As mentioned before, curation is not critical to me personally but I am disappointed for some important and valuable societal messages are not presented to valued Medium readers for unknown reason.

My aim is to explore the reasons and create awareness for this important issue for Medium. Those Medium readers following the topics may think that those are the only valuable content on Medium.

From my observations, the curated topics represent fewer than 10% of the quality materials created on Medium hence our subscribed readers are not taking full advantage of Medium content. 90% of high quality content is invisible to our readers.

This is a poor business proposition for Medium. Our publication [ILLUMINATION] is proactively working on this issue.

Our Distributed List Today

Please read and support as many articles as you can. Share in every possible avenue. Let’s amplify our content and reach out to bigger audience each day.

This is the list which helped us gain over 500 followers today.

Invitation to new writers

If you want to join our growing and supportive community as a writer, please leave a message on our FAQ document. We are a writers’ community. We curate and amplify valuable content for creating awareness and visibility to extended audiences.

Connect with ILLUMINATION editors and writers

You can connect our editors and writers by clicking on their Medium accounts provided below. By following them you can access their materials easier. Our community of writers know importance of reciprocity hence they can follow you back to create synergy.